Pervasive ice sheet mass loss reflects competing ocean and atmosphere processes

• DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz5845
• Publication Date: 2020-04-30T23:06:11Z
• Authors: Ben Smith; Helen A. Fricker; Alex S. Gardner; Brooke Medley; Johan Nilsson; Fernando S. Paolo; Nicholas Holschuh; Susheel Adusumilli; Kelly Brunt; Bea Csatho; Kaitlin Harbeck; Thorsten Markus; Thomas Neumann; Matthew R. Siegfried; H. Jay Zwally
• Keywords: Climate Action; General Science & Technology; 13. Climate action; 0207 environmental engineering; 02 engineering and technology; 01 natural sciences; 0105 earth and related environmental sciences

Taking stock of our losses

Earth's ice sheets are melting and sea levels are rising, so it behooves us to understand better which climate processes are responsible for how much of the mass loss. Smith et al. estimated grounded and floating ice mass change for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets from 2003 to 2019 using satellite laser altimetry data from NASA's ICESat and ICESat-2 satellites. They show how changing ice flow, melting, and precipitation affect different regions of ice and estimate that grounded-ice loss averaged close to 320 gigatons per year over that period and contributed 14 millimeters to sea level rise.

Science , this issue p. 1239